Find Out if You Are Getting The Net Speed You Pay Your ISP For?

This site provides you with an interface to test the speed of your internet connection and then it provides you with a graphical display that summarizes how your speed compares with the average in your city/state/country… Everyone should run this so they understand what they are getting. I was surprised and upset when I figured out that I was not getting the service I was paying for.

The test is easy to do, so just go to this site and choose a server location. The ads are a little confusing so stay away from all those, just choose a server that is close to your geographical location and it will take care of the rest. When the test is complete, click on the ‘my summary’ tab at the top. You can run the test several times and it will keep track of each test and display the results, this way, you’ll know it wasn’t a ‘fluke’… I’ve only run my test 3 times over 2 days… I’ll keep testing, but at this point, I’m fairly certain these figures are typical of the throughput I normally get. More details on my personal ‘tail of woe’ are at the bottom of the page, after the information on Speedtest.net

I’ve often wondered why it sometimes seems to take a long time for me to navigate from page to page on the internet. I’ve tuned my PC, bought one of the best ISP packages available in my area, I use Mozilla and have tried other popular browsers, I spent time tuning my browsers and tweaking the way they handle cash… but I always seem to be slower at home than I do when I log onto some other network. I’ve been unsatisfied with Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service for other reasons but this is something new. The other reason I’ve had some frustration with this ISP is because my line drops about 10 times a day and the only way I can fix it (after investing time with their tech support) is to reboot my router. About a year ago it dropped my line and when I rebooted my router it didn’t fix the problem. They told me my router was old, which upset me because it was a linksys router, nothing had changed on my end, and it was a very popular product… but I bent over, ‘assumed the position’ and went out and bought a new Netgear router and I was up and running again, but my line still drops at least 10 times a day… Once I got so frustrated that I tried to cancel my service and I spent over 2 hours on the phone talking with customer service people and running into dead ends and finally they referred me to the phone number for their ‘customer attrition center’ which rang busy every time I called. To make a long story short… I just let it go because I didn’t have time to dork with it. I’m paying 150 bucks for my phone, Road Runner, and the most basic cable you can get (that has the box, which I need so I can get Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon for my kids). If I were getting excellent service and great speed out of my internet connection it would still be too much but to be paying above market prices and then receive below average (market specific) quality… it just adds insult to injury. So now that I’m sure of the cause and what is to blame… I’m going to figure out a way to resolve the situation and either fix the problem or cancel the service. Who has time to deal with this kind of crap…

It seems like, in today’s economy, the consumer has to fight so hard to get a fair deal from so many of the companies we do business with. The frustration and stress that we have to live with are unprecidented in human history. If you don’t watch everything you pay for like a hawk you’ll end up on the short end of the stick. What’s worse is that sometimes you need to fix a situation but you can’t do it, and the reason you can’t do it is because the company has knowingly used a strategy to frustrate you so you will go away and put up with their low quality or damaged or misconfigured product. Between banks, insurance companies, heating and air conditioning (maybe I should just say contracting in general), wireless phone companies, and all the other products and services we must buy to keep our world running… we spend so much time dealing with crappy customer service that it drives us all nuts. Why is it that all these companies are out to deliver poor quality and a terrible customer experience. Corporate America deserves to have the shit hit the fan. A generation ago business practices like this would have been considered illegal. These strategies designed to knowingly frustrate the customer are unacceptable and shouldn’t make sense in a healthy fair market. And when the government then bails out these crooked companies it really screws everything up. We should never have started giving money away because now the companies can screw the consumer all they want and they won’t go out of business and they probably won’t have to lay people off! How will they know the difference between right and wrong? What ‘control’ is there to ensure the customer gets what they pay for? Big business will frustrate and steal from the consumer whenever they can get away with it and for as long as they can get away with it. Eventually, America’s economy will collapse and the American consumers will all end up in funny farm somewhere, having been driven completely crazy from the insane stress of having to deal with business practices designed to frustrate them so they won’t get their issues resolved. It’s a rediculus and awful situation and the American businesses that utilize these tactics deserve to go out of business and they should be ashamed of themselves. It’s a sad situation because eventually we’ll probably decide to put government regulations in place to protect the consumer from the people they are doing business with. The free market is a wonderful thing. Through it’s nature, it resolves all these issues. But when our government ‘bails out’ and provides ‘stimulas packages’ we are screwing with the ‘nature’ of the free market and everything falls apart. The only role government should play is to ensure the free market is exactly that so everyone can open up a business and compete at the same level. The minute it becomes viable (and it’s coming) for me to utilize the Internet as my feed for my television, I am going to say goodbye to the cable company. If they were smart, they would be working hard to build customer loyalty instead of squeezing every cent out of their installed base and cutting their business costs so close to the bone that they can’t support their comittments. The whole situation is infuriating to me!!!